A technical look on building a democracy

A very opinionated update

It has been 2 months since my last update on Theodorus. A lot of things happened during that time. I worked on 3 different small-scaled projects; I’ve gotten myself into a serious relationship (with a girl!) and became coerced to my paying job but finally I found the time and inspiration to add a small feature to the project – opinions instead of comments.

I got to participate in a very lengthy discussion about the women-rights and interesting as it was, I found it hellish to keep track and I figured that for people who wish to join the meeting in the middle and it would down-right impossible to catch up. So my thought was this – each person is entitled for a single declared opinion; he/she may change his mind but the important thing is that newcomers will now need to read only as many messages as the number of participants, which is much easier than an endless amount of messages.

I’m guessing I should be limiting the opinion’s length as well, but I’m still not sure for how much as 140 characters seems too small. maybe 10×140? I’ll think about it some more.
Another complementary option I should add is a history button, showing all the previous editing as up until now there was no updating feature so nothing would have gotten lost. It won’t be very simple because it will require a DB-update to support history of elements.

At any rate, I’m glad to continue working on Theodorus and I’m hoping to find more time for it.